Leap Motion: great leap forward or gimmick?

Technology is prone to false dawns. Not many people who watched Kathryn Bigelow’s film Strange Days back in 1995 would have expected perfect recordings of sensory experiences to be possible by New Year’s Eve 1999, of course – but we might have hoped that the answering machine that can turn a drawled message from Tom Sizemore into written English might have actually come about. Voice recognition is better now than it was then, but it still isn’t that good.

Likewise for new control interfaces – there have been developments, but they haven’t exceeded our expectations. Nintendo’s Wiimote promised wholly new ways to interact with games, but for most serious releases, players bust out their old Gamecube pads instead. The Kinect motion sensor, meanwhile, has not provided anything more than novelty value to gamers.

The most promising thing about the company Leap Motion’s upcoming input device (called, somewhat unimaginatively, the Leap), then, is simply that – from what details have emerged so far – it might be able to deliver what the likes of Kinect promised: that is, a genuinely new way to interact with computer hardware, one that exceeds our expectations.

The Leap Motion is based on a small cluster of VGA camera sensors – housed in a breakout box in current designs, but, in principle, small enough to be mounted directly into a laptop – which produce a 3D model of the space in front of it. It is able to identify objects in this field, apparently to the point of being able to distinguish a finger from a pencil, and then send control data to the computer.

Quite apart from anything else, it’s the accuracy level that has got geeks the world over all hot and bothered; the Leap can detect movements down to 0.01mm. This accuracy opens up endless possibilities. The demo video on Leap Motion’s website suggests the most obvious one – precise, mouse-and-keyboard-free control of all in one computers, applied to everything from handwriting to a game of Half Life 2. But that level of accuracy would also surely be sufficient for many tasks in industry, and Leap Motion have already suggested that this technology may have uses in remote surgery. The 3D approach, meanwhile, will tantalize digital artists with the prospect of a genuinely intuitive interface for 3D modelling and design.

Whether the Leap fulfils all these promises is partly a matter of honing the technology adequately for the upcoming launch – three cubic feet is probably not a large enough range, though Leap Motion claim that this is simply a matter of getting better sensors into the box. More significant is the problem of getting developers interested. Leap Motion have at least made a serious effort, producing a fully-featured SDK and providing units in advance to interested parties. It will be interesting to see what’s available on launch, which is scheduled for this winter at a relatively modest price point of $70.

Again, it’s not a good idea to get too swept up in the PR hype surrounding new gadgets. Leap Motion grandly claim that they will change computing practices forever. On the basis of the cold hard facts currently available, they ought to at least give the computing world a serious shake-up.